January 6, 2009 We first covered the Pacemaker portable digital DJ system back in June 2007, and it has since won a number of awards including a CES Innovations and Engineering Award for 2009. A new model targeted at consumers has arrived with a smaller 60GB hard drive, a lower price point (US$550) to match, and one key new feature designed to aid beginner DJs - the ability to beatmatch and synchronize two songs with a single button press, and get straight to the fun stuff like EQ, filters, effects and crossfading.
Now that we've seen one in the flesh, we can safely say it's a surprisingly complete package that is capable of more than a few things your average set of Pioneer CDJs and mixer isn't - roll/stutter and bitcrush effects, looping and manipulating loops on the fly, and separate 3-band EQ for the line-out and your headphones which allows you to work around limitations of the environment and your gear.
Other new features include iPhone/touch-style navigation of your music library via the touch pad, and the ability to transfer sets you have recorded on the Pacemaker to a software package called Pacemaker Editor (Windows and OS X) for some final tweaks.
The updated Pacemaker is set for a Spring 2009 release.
